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							<h3 id="sidebar-content-header">Cost</h3>
							<p>The increase in the medical care and health insurance costs today is affecting the lives of a lot of people in one way or another. 
							Not only the uninsured population faces the problem for the inability to pay for necessary health care services, but also even the 
							insured population is troubled with such issue. In the US, older Americans and those individuals having low income were privileged
							to be ensured in health care payment through President Johnson's Medicare and Medicaid legislations. In effect, the system catered
							millions of patients. However, a huge cost of expenditures was incurred for this, along with quality of care compromised. Although
							this opened an improved access to appropriate care for a lot of citizens, the health care system's extra capacity and unverified
							supply of finances resulted to several unnecessary prescriptions, surgeries, clinical procedures and tests. Health care cost reduction
							has been the primary goal of most of the federal health legislations of the state, but little attention has been given to both of health
							care's quality and accessibility.  </p>
							
							<p>Throughout the history, the most significant driving force for health care reforms has been the increasing costs in health care
							services and insurance premiums. In the US, cost containment has been the aim for most of the federal health laws, after the 
							implementation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, but no success has been made. In general, an increase from 5.3% in US gross 
							domestic product in 1960 to over 17.6% in 2009 was evident in health care costs. Spending for health care has been growing much 
							faster than the rest of the nation's economy. Over $2.5 trillion was spent in health care alone in 2009. Moreover, a significant 
							increase of 131% on health insurance premiums sponsored by employers, and an increase in employee's share is also evident. </p>
							
							<p>An estimated of 37 million of the American population does not have sufficient or any health insurance in the year 1994.
							Most recent statistics shows that the number of the uninsured rose to almost 46.7 million Americans. However, the composition 
							of the uninsured population constantly varies over time. When those unemployed individuals or those on Medicaid acquire jobs
							that provide them with better health insurance, they leave the population of the uninsured. However they are replaced by those 
							individuals who lose Medicaid coverage or lose their jobs. Due to the alarming cost increase of health insurance, a lot of 
							employers reduce or eventually eliminate the benefit of offering health insurance coverage for their employees.  </p>
							
							<p>Priorities of the nation when it comes to providing health care services has been identified as one of the root causes for
							the obvious mismatch in health care's rapid increase in cost. For instance, intensive efforts and costs are provided to the death 
							of terminally-ill patients for a few more weeks or days, and much focus and huge expenses are given to saving extremely premature 
							infants while thousands of women are not given proper prenatal care that would supposedly alleviate cases on prematurity. It is quite 
							complicated to understand the goals of the system that puts little emphasis on significantly effective and inexpensive prenatal care
							services that would have prevented poor birth deliveries, but instead focuses on the investment on the expensive and most sophisticated
							neonatal services in saving premature infants. Obviously, current priorities put greater favour on heroic medicine over the inexpensive
							preventive care that would have resulted in effective human and economic benefits. </p>
							
							<p>Aside from the priorities of Health Care in the nation, a lot of factors contribute to high health care cost and spending.  
							These causes include lack of transparency of information on prices and quality, defensive medicine, higher prices for medical 
							services, provider consolidation, paying for volume over value, and the use of modern technologies and sophisticated treatments 
							with no consideration on effectiveness. These problems on cost and spending are neither simple nor easy to solve, however they 
							must be addressed or else further impact will be much severe.</p>
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